


Handwriting

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, belated 4th of july thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1905711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a safe deposit box that was opened in Zurich in 1963, they find a scrap of paper with information about Captain America. Most of it is public knowledge; nothing about it is especially interesting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Handwriting

Steve wondered if it was a peace offering. He had no doubt Fury knew that Steve was starting to chafe under the yoke of his SHIELD duties, and he thought Fury wasn’t too pleased with him either—although, in a way, he also thought Fury would be disappointed if Steve obeyed every order he was given without question.

“What is it?” Steve said, looking at the paper dossier Fury had slid over his desk.

“We hoped you could tell us,” Fury said, folding his hands together on his desk and giving Steve that inscrutable look.

Inside the dossier was a brief report together with a piece of paper that, according to Fury, had been found in a safe deposit box. A safe deposit box that had been opened in 1963 in Zurich—and hadn’t been accessed since. The paper itself was only a torn scrap, but on it was scrawled, _Steve. Cp America. 4 July._   _St. Peter’s in Chains._

“It’s just—it’s just information about me,” Steve said. His life was public enough that it would all be common knowledge, but it was strange to see it written down this way, like a secret. “Steve, Captain America. My birthday. The elementary school I went to.”

Fury tilted his head slightly. “Why the school?” he said.

Steve shook his head. “It’s—I don’t know, it’s been shut down now. Was shut down in 1996.” It had been the place where he met Bucky, right on the asphalt by the place where the girls always chalked out their hopscotch squares. Now it was a parking garage.

“I see,” Fury said.

Steve didn’t see, and he wasn’t sure what Fury saw, but there was nothing else he could say to help, so he left.

The next time it happened was in a disused Underground station being used by a drug cartel in London. Natasha had finished tying up all the people that SHIELD would pick up shortly for interrogation, but Steve was drawn to the crumbling wall. In a blank space left by a gun rack that had been torn off in the fight they’d just finished, there were words scratched in the brick: 

 _SGR. Captain America_. _New York, NY. Charcole. Howling Comma_

 “Steve?” Natasha said, walking up behind him.

 “Yeah,” he said, fingers tracing the etching. His initials, his name. Everyone knew he was from New York. But _charcole_. Charcoal? He’d spent a summer obsessed with sketching in charcoal, gotten all of his white shirts greyed at the cuffs with the residue on his hands and driven Bucky up the wall.  Howling Commandos. Whoever scratched the words had been interrupted, or hadn’t had time to finish.

 _Charcoal_. Was that what the word meant? Why the misspelling? Why charcoal? Everything else there was public knowledge, but _charcoal_. Steve never told the media he had liked to draw. It hadn’t fit with Captain America’s image, or hadn’t been necessary. It was private.

“I’m going to take a picture,” Natasha said, from over Steve’s shoulder. Steve turned away from the words to let her. Her phone snapped—the fake sound of a real camera shutter.

This was London, Steve thought; could Falsworth have been down here? But while Falsworth had seen Steve sketching with odd pencils, he didn’t know about the charcoal. That was from Brooklyn.

“Any ideas?” Natasha said evenly.

“No,” Steve said. There was only one person who really could have written this, and it was impossible for him to have written it, so there was no point in thinking about it at all.

Not long afterwards, there was a mission on a ship, and Steve forgot all about the safe deposit box and the writing on the wall. After Bucky came to the Tower and didn’t vanish but stayed there, in a room just across the hall from Steve’s, everything from before SHIELD had fallen was . . . before.

Until the fourth of July, the first one since Bucky had come back. Sam and Natasha and the others had been not-very-clandestinely conspiring for over a week before it, so Steve wasn’t, actually, surprised when Stark began to herd him up to a “barbecue” on the penthouse level. But he put on a nice shirt and went anyway because Steve always had a sense of when Bucky was doing something for him, always did, and he had that sense about the party.

Of course, Stark had draped the rooftop patio and the landing pad with every kind of sparkly red-white-and-blue thing he’d found, and there was a cake as well as beer and more food than Steve could have dreamed of, once. And Bucky was sitting on a deck chair between Natasha and Sam, even opening beers for them with his metal hand and giving an opinion on how the burgers were doing on the grill and if the few grey clouds in the sky were going to become rain.

The party went on, with lots of photographs—Steve had balked at them at first, but now he had learned to almost tune out the camera flashes from people’s phones—and music coming from somewhere in the tower. Then, as the sun began to set, Stark clapped his hands and declared that it was time for gifts and that Steve was not allowed to escape.

Steve sat down then on a chair that was especially wreathed with spangled tinsel and tried to take the packages that his friends gave him as gracefully as possible. They were thoughtful gifts, kind, even if he didn’t need them.  Of course, by either fate or Tony’s plan, the last bag and card were from Bucky. Steve knew Bucky wanted to watch Steve open it, but didn’t want to be looked at or thanked too much ( “It’s nothin’,” he had always said in the past, and then he would reach out and clap Steve on the back—)

So Steve focused on opening the tin in the bag to find—plastic molding inside, and placed in each hollow just so, like chocolates in a box, an array of charcoal in thin pencils, chalks, sticks, and blocks—every kind he could have imagined, and then some. Bucky remembered. He remembered that summer—1940, it had been.

“Now, since you got this, you can’t get mad at me when I get smudges on everything,” Steve said at last, looking up.

Steve wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say, but then Bucky’s little, unsure smile turned into a big one, and, just like that, the weather and the wear on his face didn’t show so much. “No deal,” he said.

As an afterthought, Steve opened the card. Bucky’s writing these days sometimes came out a mix of different letterings and spellings, sometimes had stray other languages lost in it, but it was easy enough to read:

 

 _happy_ б _irthday_

_maybe you want to try the charcole again_

_\- JBB_

 

Steve held on to the card, ignored Tony when he said, “What’s it say?” Instead, he made himself fold up the card, carefully, and tuck it into the case with the pencils, so that he wouldn’t lose it. He thought of that little slip of paper from the safe deposit box—he’d left it with Fury, like it was some piece of junk. Maybe he could still go back and find it somewhere in Fury’s office. Maybe it wasn’t lost.

“How’d you know I was thinking about using charcoal again?” Steve said, even though that wasn’t really true.

“It’s nothin’,” Bucky said, but for once he stopped peeling the label from his beer bottle, and Steve reached out instead and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Okay, time for fireworks!” Tony said.

As Tony bustled around and people dragged deck chairs over the patio or arranged themselves on other people, Steve wondered if anyone had ever tried as hard as Bucky had, all his life, and how Steve could be the only one who knew it. All he could do, as lights began to become flowers and gold fountains in the sky above Stark Tower, was reach out in the muted evening for Bucky’s hand, calloused and warm, and watch the night that way.

**Author's Note:**

> I love comments! Happy belated 4th, to anyone who celebrates the holiday! : )


End file.
